Representation and truth

For a while, I’ve been thinking of a teleological/normative account of representation. The basic idea is that:

1. State S represents reality being such that r if and only if one’s teleology specifies that one should be in state S only if r.

But I’ve also been worried that this makes representation much too common in the world. If a bacterium’s nature says that some behavior that should only be triggered under some circumstances, then on this account, the bacterium’s behavior represents the occurrence of these circumstances.

I am kind of willing to bite that bullet. But perhaps I don’t need to.

For a long time I’ve been sensitive to the difference between a proposition p and the second-order proposition that p is true, but this sensitivity has largely been a matter of nitpicking. But today I realized that this distinction may help save the teleological account of normativity with a very small tweak:

2. State S represents a proposition p if and only if one’s teleology specifies that one should be in state S only if p is true.

It is plausible that only higher organisms have a teleology that makes reference to truth as such.

Remark 1: If we want, we can have both (1) and (2) by distinguishing between “simple representation” and “alethic representation”. Alethic representation is then related to simple representation as follows:

3. State S alethically represents reality being such that r if and only if S simply represents reality being such that it is true that r.

Remark 2: Given Leon Porter’s argument that truth is not a physical property, it is interesting to note that on the alethic version, representation requires a being that has normative properties that make reference to something nonphysical. In particular, this kind of normativity cannot be grounded in evolution.